Customer Reviews

Seagate FreeAgent Go 160 GB USB External Hard Drive ST901603FGA1E1-RK

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I got one of the first units, and use it every day now for 1 month (around 2 connect/disconnect per day). It DOES NOT require 2 USB ports, the second USB connector is provided for use only if you plug it into a data only USB port (for example non powered USB hub, some ports in some laptops). When using standard port, use thicker cable (data + power), leave another not connected, this is how I use it. This is common solution, not unique to this model or this brand. Yes, it is NOT housed in an aluminum case, and the top of the housing would flex when you press it hard with your finger. This is perfectly valid engineering solution. Next time you are on a plane observe the wings -- are they flexing? Is it any indication how solid the plane is? I carry a leather wallet and plastic cased Seagate Free Agent Go, both flex a bit, none breaks. If additional pre-loaded software is not what you need, delete it. Easy. Try free PortableApps.com, other portable solutions, or none.

The drive is practically noiseless, goes to sleep mode (disk stops spinning) after preset time (many external drives spin continuously which shortens their life), read/write is very fast. Side orange light very nice and functional. The drive is using new perpendicular magnetic recording to provide higher capacity in physically smaller drive (strangely I could not confirm this as I failed to find Seagate technical data for FreeAgent series). 5 years warranty is great. I would prefer to see a short USB cable integrated with a case and an additional cable extension, but this is small detail. Overall this is excellent product.

I travel in excess of 150 days a year and do more than 100 presentations a year. I've been stranded, bumped and booted on just about every continent. I've not had PC access for a number of reasons or been forced to use a promoter's PC.

This drive takes care of all those problems. Well, all except the airline issues, but it does make them more bearable.

This drive is slightly larger than a BlackBerry, thinner than a deck of cards and a massive 160 gigs. It is lightening fast and the software that comes with it is phenomenal. At first I was unsure about the software, but the first time I plugged it into a presenters computer and had my desktop available to me along with all my programs, all my data, everything I needed, I was hooked. When I plugged it into a hotel PC I was converted.

If you travel or even if you just want a powerful backup between home and office, this drive is the best external portable I've owned and I've owned them all in the past few years.

The only thing that I found a little odd was a separate USB power connector that was for power only. You really don't need it, it seems redundant.

I can't recommend this drive enough. I just bought one for a collegue who is a much a road warrior as I am as a gift and he is thrilled with it as well.

I strongly recommend this drive.
Dave Lakhani
Author
Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want and
Power of An Hour: Business and Life Mastery in One Hour A Week

If you avoid installing Ceedo and only use this disk's software to do data backups, which is what I bought this USB 2.5 disk for, there is a big problem.

The problem is that the software prevents you from permanently deleting most file types from your system. Once the Seagate software sees a file and copies it to the external disk it will keep restoring it to your computer each time you refresh your backup.

For example if you rearrange your documents into named folders you will soon discover you have the files both as originally organized and as new folders with their own copies.

Seagate discards no photos it has backed up. You can weed all you like but the backup disk still contains the weeds. To preserve the benefit of your weeding you may want to immediately rename the folder. Then Seagate will have your photos stored twice under the two folder names. The old folder with the weeds will reappear on your next backup. If you don't rename the folder, then the weeds will reappear just where you deleted them.

Seagate's help file say it will cover how to "Select your own folders and configure your own sync rules." That hints at having once considered letting you set up rules like "only copy files to the Seagate on `Synchronize' but do not copy files back to the computer."

However all Seagate actually delivered is an "ask me" function. Being asked, file by file about every file you want to back up and then about every file you ever deleted in the past is no fun. The "yes to all" and "no to all" buttons don't help because first you are asked about every individual file to be copied to the Seagate, then you are asked about every file you ever deleted. "Yes to all" doesn't stop until both phases have completed.

Besides Seagate sometimes ignores your "ask me" and just restores all the deleted files.

The only simple way I have found to get past this problem is to go onto the backup drive and delete the no-longer desired files or the whole folder which contains undesired files.

I found it very difficult to safely use the software that is the distinguishing feature of this USB 2.5 disk, at least not for the simple backup purpose I wanted.

The disks themselves are fine. I have both a 120 and a 160 as I didn't immediately notice the backwash of old data.

When I first thought of buying an external hdd I was worried to buy one without external powersupply. But this one is cool. It works like magic. 5400 rpm hdd but it will take up two of your USB slots. I think it uses two to gather power. The included software is good it will make a My computer like view also. It is named CEEDO. The data transfer rate is quite fast. This is very small and lightweight. When I got the box I thought it might be empty (it is so light). The manual is not that great but enough to get you going.

As small hard disks go this one is pretty much top of the line. I also considered getting the Western Digital passport 160 gb but just fell for the looks on this one and nothing else. The glowing orange drive was like a beacon and this one did pretty much the same things that the western digital did and more. I am presently not using Ceedo too actively so really cannot highlight the benefits of that but in the world of big and small this drive delivers the two contrasts equally well. Firstly the small form factor really makes it convenient to carry this with you wherever you wanna go. I have an ultra portable (Dell D410) and a Maxtor 500 GB external hard drive that I used both for my laptop as well as desktop but it was a pain to carry. The hard drive weighed twice as much as my laptop so really a needed a fix for this. I started looking around and both the WD Passport and the Maxtor 160 GB caught my eye. As I was researching these this one was announced and I decided to wait for it, I was a little surprised when on a trip to Singapore right after I saw these drives being sold there (A little more expensive than what Amazon sells these for) and after seeing a demo by the store representative I had to have it. I bought this on the spot even when the WD was a little cheaper as it was really classy to look at. My usual clutter and weight was immediately cut by 90%. The drive is not as fast as some of the reviewers pointed it to be but does fairly well when the amount of data to be copied is not a lot. If ur going to use this for business needs like I do I am pretty sure ur not going to be doing data transfers in access of 10GB at a time and for smaller data transfers this is perfect. Another thing that I like about this is the encryption, you can password protect the entire drive and keep almost anything on it that you don't like to be seen. I noticed that Ceedo works really well with some programs and with some others it's completely useless. After a few tries figuring the program out I let it be and realized that all I needed was a portable hard drive with a lot of space and I have got just that. The documentation around Ceedo and along with the drive could be much better like someone reported below. This is also a quite drive leaving out a very low hum you cannot hear the drive. If ur in the market for a large hard drive in terms of space but still a portable drive then this or the WD passport would be it.

First of all this is a great hard disk, but why would anyone want to spend $79 on a 160 gb hard disk when you can get a 250 gb hard disk for $96 (atleast as of July'08) - so look for a bigger drive if you can.

Note: If you want to skip the long review, you can go to the last paragraph of this review where I have some useful tips on how best to use your portable drive and how to keep ideal data backup.

It is a given fact that any portable drive you buy in the market today is going to perform good in the short term - maybe 3 months, 6 months or even a year.

But when you are buying a portable drive - you have to look beyond 3-5 years because thats how long you are probably going to keep your drive. You have to look at the reliability of the drive - to not lose any data because of hard disk failures.

I have used various drives - Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung .., but I can vouch for the fact that Seagate is the numero uno when it comes to drive reliability. I have had many laptop & portable drives give up on me, but Seagate has never let me down.

Seagate is usually bit more expensive than others - but very reliable.

About this particular drive:
+ It is light weight, has a dim light indicator on one of the sides which tells that the drive is plugged in
+ Neat sleek casing which makes it look good
+ Thick and flexible USB cable which makes it easy to plug the drive without any fear of breaking/twiching the cable
+ Very light weight drive
+ Comes with the Ceedo software which will make your desktop applications portable (I have never used it myself, but there are good reviews about this software on the internet)

What I do not like about the drive:
- I wish if it was packed with some better backup software like SecondCopy

Tip #1: Backup software
=======================
Ok, now that you have a backup drive, how do you plan to use it to backup your data on your laptop/desktop ? I use a software called SecondCopy - which I found to be very addictive to use:
- Once you have this software installed, you can select all the folders on your desktop/laptop that you want to backup and also select the destination where you want to backup
- You can configure the backup profile in such a way that either automatically or manually, the software will find the differences between the 2 drives and display the differences to you and let you backup data from your laptop/desktop on to your drive.

Tip #2: Secondary Backup
=========================
+ Now, that you have all your backup setup and you throw in your drive in your laptop bag and unfortunately you leave your laptop bag in your car and your laptop along with your backup drive is stolen, what do you do in this case where you have lost your primary data as well as your backup data - there are 2 options
- Do not keep your portable drive in the same bag in which you carry your laptop, which is a bit of an inconvinience
- Or, you buy another drive - you can either buy a similar drive or buy a 3.5" big hard drive(which needs external power supply) and keep it at home and keep your backups on both the portable drive as well as the big drive which you have at your home - this way even if you lose your laptop bag or even if you lose your big hard drive at home, there is another backup from which you can retrieve your dear data - your photos, your projects, your movies, music ...

Tip #3: Network drive
======================
This is the ultimate nirvana of any drive. Basically you will have to buy a network drive device and connect this to your hard disk, once you do that and do some additional configuration, you can let your drive be available on your home network - this way, you can listen to your music/watch movies that are there on your hard disk from any computer in your home/from an Apple TV .... Or you can even leave your hard disk at home and access the data from outside of your home(from office/anywhere else there is internet). The network drive comes with its own security settings etc, so you do not have to worry about a hacker accessing your drive.

Works well as additional storage. Have not used the Ceedo feature so can't comment on that. Formatted capacity is 149GB; only about 118 MB are taken up by the Ceedo application so very little impact if you leave it on the drive. Can be removed if you don't want to use it. Drive is formatted in NTFS but can be reformatted FAT32 for use with Linux or Mac systems. The following case holds the drive and the cable: Small External HD Case Black. It is a snug fit but very secure and no wasted space. Reliability concerns over the WD Passport line led me in this direction and it seems like a good choice so far. Includes special cable to draw power from two laptop USB ports. I found that if I used only one I received power surge warnings from the USB port. Worked best when I plugged both laptop ends of the cable into the computer before plugging the other end into the hard drive.

I love this external hard drive along with the Ceedo program. It works great at works and else where you can bring your application with you. Many workplace does not allow unauthorized application but with this Ceedo application you can install any software you like (have to buy Argo or try it for 45 days) on this drive and run the application virtually off the drive. When done, just eject the drive and all trace of this application is removed.

Not enough USB for the 2nd power for your ext. hd? Use a PS/2 to USB adapter that came with your mouse purchase. Most mouse comes with this adapter for old pc that doesn't have a USB port.

There is no case for this ext. hd. The one that CaseLogic sell it a little too small for it. It is off like a 2CM and it might work but I have not purchase this case to test it [EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE CASE BLACK FITS SMALL PORTABLE HARD DRIVES (PHDC-1)]. My other solution was just to use a regular CD wallet case from CaseLogic (the nylon one that holds 12-CDS). This case fits perfectly for this hard drive.

I spent a couple of hours researching portable hard drives and their brands. After reading an excellent review in one of the PC magazines, I settled on the Seagate brand. This model (FreeAgent Go 160 USB) comes with software called Ceedo, which attempts to give you a desktop on the go - meaning, in theory, you should be able to plug it in to any PC with a USB port and use it as you would at home.

Unfortunately, the "approved" software for Ceedo is extremely limited right now. If you use Internet Explorer, you can take it (and your bookmarks and other settings) anywhere. But other Microsoft Office products are not approved, and neither is any of the other software I use on a daily basis.

In time, this may change, so if you don't need the 8gb of space Ceedo takes, you might keep it for awhile and hope for improvements. Otherwise, I suggest uninstalling it and using the drive for storage (as was my original intention).

On my laptop, which is a year-old Gateway product (1.66 ghz dual processor, 2 gb RAM), the portable drive requires both USB cables to be plugged in, or it doesn't receive sufficient power.

I've stored several games with heavy-duty graphics and processing requirements. These run just fine from the external drive.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the product. As a result of this experience, I just invested in a Seagate 3.5 USB external drive.

I almost always dislike 5 star reviews.
Can anything really be THAT good?
Yup.
When you open the box you'll be greeted with a refreshingly efficient and easy to deal with packaging design. You find clearly labeled pieces and a fold-out instructions sheet that tells you how long it will take to complete the very few steps of setup.

I run an Apple Macbook Pro, and I had this hard drive hooked up and running in 45 seconds, and that includes climbing around under my desk to plug it in.

Seagate got this one right. I've bought several portable hard drives in my time and I can say this is unequivocally the best designed and packaged one I've experienced. Thus far I've had nothing but good experiences with it.

A WARNING, this is still a hard drive. It still has moving parts, it will still fail if you don't treat it with respect. If you fly with this, pack it in with a bunch of clothes. If you're using it, leave it alone. Don't touch it, don't bump it. It's a platter spinning at seven thousand, two hundred revolutions per minute with a read/write head dancing over it's surface magnetically manipulating little bits of metal. You can very easily break this, so be smart.